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On the growth of home computes

I just bought a new iMac for my wife. Like my flash drive post, I’ll try to compare what’s in our home today against our first home PC.

I won’t make the same mistakes I did in that post. But I may make different ones.

Our first system was a standard PC with a Nanao 19″ monitor. It ran Windows 95, 98, 98 second edition, Me, and then I replaced it. Our current systems are a 17″ MacBook Pro and a 24″ iMac.

I don’t have our first system to benchmark against, but I do remember some salient hardware specs.

What

Then

Now

Difference

Purchase year

1996

2008 – 2009

~12 years

Computers

1 desktop

1 laptop, 1 desktop

x 2

Total cost

$6,000, + printer

$6,000, + printer

same

GHz x # cores

.166

10.8

x 65

Graphics chips

1 slow poke

2 speedy chips

x lots

RAM

32MB

8GB

x 250

RAM speed

Don’t remember

667MHz, 800MHz

x 6?

Disk

4GB

506GB int. + 2TB NAS = 2.5TB

x 625

Disk speed

5400rpm?

1 5400rpm, 1 7200rpm

x 1.33? (desktop comparison)

Local network

10Mbit

1000Mbit

x 100

Internet

54Kbps

7Mbps down, 896Kbps up

x 130, x17

Screens

19″ Nanao CRT, 1024 x 768 max useable

1 17″, 1 24″ plasmas, both 1920 x 1200

x 5.9 pixels, – volume, – weight

Power

300W, I think

85W + 280W = 365W

x 1.22

Printer

Dedicated HP DeskJet color inkjet

Networked Samsung ML-2551N b&w laser

– color, + everything else

For our first system, I don’t recall (and so cannot compare) disk caches, processor caches, motherboard I/O bus performance, graphics processor performance, or system MTBF. It was an ISA bus system, with then-standard serial, parallel, and video connectors out of the case. Today’s system are festooned with USB and FireWire connectors, a DVI connector, and an ExpressCard connector.